Where Did CNN’s Pioneer Spirit Go?

When CNN executives talked about the major management restructuring unveiled earlier this week, they painted it in terms of leading the charge into the digital future, as delivery of news and information changes at lightning speed.

What they didn’t say is how spectacularly the 20-year-old network, which redefined television news in its early days when Ted Turner pioneered a 24-hour-cable news channel, has failed to adapt to the already new realities, as competitors MSNBC and Fox News Channel have launched and CNBC has gained prominence.

In four short years--both Fox and MSNBC went on the air in 1996--CNN essentially gave away its franchise in the U.S., leaving it to look to new distribution outlets, from cell phones to airplanes, for its future growth. In effectively ousting CNN USA President Richard Kaplan, they pinned the blame on someone who, although certainly a controversial figure, was working to great extent with severe restrictions.

To be sure, Kaplan, hired in 1997 to revamp programming for the times when no major news stories were breaking to draw viewers in, must share some of the blame. The lack of energy and focus during CNN’s political convention coverage was the buzz of media circles at the recent gatherings--it was widely noted that CNN, which has dubbed itself “America’s Campaign Headquarters,” cut away for the crucial part of Jesse Jackson’s speech in Los Angeles--and Kaplan himself was the one in the control room producing the show. San Francisco Chronicle TV critic John Carman called it: “Enervated coverage. Weird lapses. An anchor team that doesn’t seem to coalesce,” adding that “MSNBC has, in fact, made the most of two dull political conventions while CNN seemed to be slogging through molasses.”

One former employee says CNN’s real problem is “every time they don’t get ratings and programming, they blame it on marketing. The changes made Wednesday have nothing to do with upgrading the quality of programming.”

(Indeed, CNN executives said Wednesday that they will increase marketing efforts for the network. But some inside CNN argue that marketing actually is part of the problem, noting that it was only last year that CNN launched its first-ever major advertising campaign, spending $15 million to spread the word through non-Turner-owned cable outlets, the network’s previous method of promoting itself. That expenditure was a full three years after the competition arrived on the scene.)

At CNN there has been much hand-wringing about how difficult it is to find an audience when there is no war or plane crash to draw viewers in. Although not so pessimistic, senior political analyst Jeff Greenfield says, “We need to get to a second stage,” adding that “this is a really complicated piece of business. The still-dominant cable news network “throws off scads of profits,” he says, at the same time it is faced with competition where it had none before. And, he said, it is attempting to adapt at a time when news just isn’t as important to people.

“There’s nothing you can do about the fact that news today doesn’t have the compelling edge to it that it had most of time in the past,” he notes. “I’m not rooting for World War III to break out, or for the economy to collapse, or race riots. I’m prepared to deal with the fact that we live in peaceful times and it makes it harder.”

Nonetheless, Fox, widely derided inside CNN, has proven there is a way.

Fox, which viewers either love or hate for its opinionated, brash, often ragged programming, has proven it is possible to forge a cohesive identity that CNN lacks as it careens through the day from serious news to show business fluff to “Talk Back Live,” a bare-bones talk show set in the atrium of CNN’s Atlanta headquarters.

Part of the problem is CNN’s legendary tightfistedness. Kaplan hired some outsiders such as his former ABC colleagues Greenfield and Willow Bay to boost the CNN on-air team, many of whom have been with the network since the beginning. But the network has been hampered for years by its unwillingness to spend money for talent. “[CNN executives] don’t understand the importance of talent,” says a producer. “In comparison to the other two channels, the talent is older and less progressive.”

Critics say much of the blame should be placed on a convoluted bureaucracy at CNN that had Kaplan in charge of domestic programming, but another executive, Eason Jordan, who was promoted in this week’s shake-up, handling the overlapping function of news gathering, a situation that frequently put the two at odds. Both reported to Tom Johnson, a former publisher of the Los Angeles Times, who is chairman of CNN News Group.

Among other oddities, CNN’s top-rated program, Larry King’s nightly talk show, didn’t even report to Kaplan, but instead was overseen directly by Johnson, who allowed a situation in which the show’s producer works from home in San Diego, while King is either in Washington, D.C., or Los Angeles. That lax setup, which is not the only such odd arrangement at CNN, raises eyebrows in the news community.

As CNN prepares for a new era of ownership under America Online, it is doing so with the same leadership that failed to adapt this time around. Turner Broadcasting System President Terence McGuirk, who oversees CNN corporately, pointed with pride on Wednesday to the fact that CNN’s new leadership team all comes from within the company.

Moreover, the new setup has added yet another layer of bureaucracy. The international operations so critical to the network’s success no longer report to Johnson but to Steven Heyer, TBS’ president and chief operating officer.

Still, not everyone is harsh about CNN’s prospects. One senior executive there notes, for example, that the emphasis on international expansion--to be mirrored in the future with a focus on expanding into online areas--has made CNN one of the world’s most recognizable brands, with advertisers paying a premium to be associated with its extensive outlets, regardless of the sharply declining ratings at home.

Greenfield, meanwhile, sees hope in some of the small programming steps planned, including his own Friday night political round-table show, that will run through the election, with everyone from novelists such as Anne Rice to advertising guru Jerry Della Femina to sports figures talking intelligently about the political landscape. CNN has also been working on a political talk show featuring a younger cast of reporters than its current shows.

“I still think CNN is the one place where you can do the kind of news that excites me,” Greenfield says. “I still think there is enough of an audience out there for that kind of news.”

“We need to keep the effort going to find new modes of making news interesting and compelling entertainment, without deciding it all has to be stories about how you’re munching at a salad bar of death, to a crime involving preferably both sex and money,” he adds.